xvii, 300 pages : 25 cm

"This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, a young girl from Camden, Maine, who used her pen as a key to open doors to the wider world. Raised in a female, theatrics-loving household, the sensitive child harbored a talent for words, music, and drama and an inexorable desire to be loved. When Edna St. Vincent Millay was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over." "She was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses." "With a poet's insight, Daniel Mark Epstein re-creates the events and ideas that led to Millay's precocious masterpiece "Renascence," published when she was just nineteen. His detective work exposes the affair between the young poet and the middle-aged editor Arthur Hooley, who encouraged her sexual adventures at Vassar. Epstein has also discovered love letters from the poet George Dillon illuminating the romance that threatened Millay's marriage, and a cache of correspondence concerning the poet's surprising obsession and success with thoroughbred horse racing."--Jacket

"A John Macrae book."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-286) and index